German climate agency leader calls for social fairness in net zero transition
BERLIN – Germany risks social unrest unless the government does more to help low-income residents manage the costs of climate policy, and particulary the transition towards net zero, the leader of Germany’s UBA environment and climate protection agency told Euractiv.
“We must support people in the lower income groups so that they are able to participate in this transition” towards net-zero in housing and transport, Dirk Messner said in an interview in Berlin.
“What we have learnt during the past four years of implementing the European Green Deal is that we need to combine these goals with the social dimension: People must be able to afford to make this transition,” said Messner.
“That’s the debate we’ve just had about the heating bill, and we’ll have it again with the ETS2, as far as buildings and transport are concerned,” he added.
The Buildings Energy Act, publicly known as the “heating bill”, is a highly-controversial mandatory phaseout of fossil-fuelled heating in many buildings across Germany in favour of more climate-friendly options like electric heat pumps or district heating. While Germany’s Christian Democrats have sworn to “abolish” the law, the Social Democrats have been pushing for a reform instead that would relax requirements but leave much of the law in place, leaving room for debate in the ongoing coalition talks.
With roughly two years to go before Germany is due to switch from a national emission trading system to the EU-wide ETS2 scheme, social advocacy groups and climate policy stakeholders alike have raised concerns that lower-income households will be disproportionately burdened by carbon pricing.
Warnings of “a storm of protest”
Messner warned that enabling lower-income groups to make the ‘green transition’ towards pricier net-zero emission technologies like heat pumps and electric vehicles “must also go hand-in-hand with securing prosperity and economic development. Otherwise, we will face a storm of protest against climate policy driven by the resulting unemployment.”
The outgoing centre-left German government had plans to reimburse lower-income households for their expenses on carbon pricing with an automated bank transfer dubbed Klimageld (or ‘climate cash’), but failed to deliver on its promise.
Messner’s agency has also spoken out explicitly in favour of the compensation scheme.
Government advisor pleads for ‘Klimageld’
On Tuesday morning, climate scientist Brigitte Knopf of Germany’s official government advisory group, the Council of Experts on Climate Change (or Klimarat), endorsed the Klimageld concept on during an appearance on Berlin-area public broadcaster rbb as a “possibility to shape climate policy in a socially responsible way”.
Her comments echoed pleas from climate advocacy groups and social welfare NGOs.
Not everyone in the green movement is on board with the payments, however. The Öko-Institut environmental research group, for example, warned that Klimageld would not actually help in the fight against climate change, as it did not encourage citizens to save on fossil fuels. The group urged a more limited programme that would be tiered by income and limited in time.
Klimageld’s main political advocates are now in opposition: the Greens made it part of their election campaign platform, while The Left has demanded that the money even be paid out retroactively.
Drafts for a coalition paper currently circulating in Berlin do not mention the term explicitly, but do include mention of intentions to facilitate a “smooth transition” to ETS2 without price surges, and to “utilize funds from the European Social Climate Fund for the support of disproportionately burdened households”.
[BTS]